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lunes, 22 de octubre de 2018

Classical Patriotism in the Current Times

by José Miguel Gambra

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

Separatisms have put patriotism in vogue, a recent fashion with its ups and downs according to the comings and goings of news about secessionism, a fashion which at any rate contrasts clearly with previous years', during which patriotic sentiments were spurned by the ones and by the others. This revival has resulted in varied and surprising phenomena. Among those who have nothing to do with traditional Catholicism, all kinds of patriotism have emerged, cultural and aesthetic some, costumbrist and purist others, constitutional patriotism, even soccer patriotism, which have nothing to do with the virtue lauded by pagan and Christian classics alike. Oddly enough, among traditionalists and Carlists, those who have put love of country aside are not lacking, for the simple reason that their object seems to have ceased to exist. To such effect, some have fixated on Europeanization and, even further, on globalization, which to their mind, will ineluctably swallow, if they have not already done so, the nations which seem to be the natural objects of patriotism. Others, in contrast, are fixated on the dissolution of the State, which they identify with nationalities, which proceed from what traditionalism prefers to call the fatherland.

This last fact — the dismantling of the state — has not been pointed out by the communications media, and merits some brief words. It is well known how modern thinking, attempting to rationalize society, ended up by destroying its natural and historical constitution, reducing it to the binomial State-individual, where the State monopolizes the totality of power and the individual is undifferentiated as to his rights. The totality of the ins and outs of social relations are, supposedly, determined by legislation which, emanated from the State's governing organs, has equal validity for all citizens. But, in fact, such simple rationalist scheme, in which many still believe, does not work that way in ever more patent ways. The authentic decision centers have moved gradually over to a series of groups, or societies, different from those recognized in the traditional constitution of the community. Not only do financial institutions, banks and multinational enterprises, which extend far away from its frontiers, escape the reach of the State, before the which the State finds itself powerless; in addition, internal cysts have grown, less powerful but much more numerous, which, being frequently outside positive law, it is not applied to them. Thus, within developed nations, with powerful States, mafias, lobbies, ghettos, sects, secret societies, and urban tribes exist, which are frequently the actual source of decisions affecting the whole of the social order. Everything not prohibited is obligatory according to the law, but the effective application of that omni-comprehensive law is made in a selective manner, according to the strength and the personal relationships of the true power centers. This evident fact was denounced since the early 70s by, among others, Humberto Eco, who saw in it a return to the middle ages in the bad sense of the word, that is, a return to feudalism and to serfdom relationships entered into in exchange for protection and privileges.[1] In good measure, I believe it would be necessary to agree with this negative view of Eco's, inasmuch as the groups that have been formed this way are not natural intermediary bodies, the vitality of which has been weakened by the rigorous liberal legislation, but are societies contrary to the Christian order when not plainly criminal communities. The teaching centers, the professional corporations, the municipal associations, if they have not been absorbed by the parties or their unions, face so many restrictions in the legislation, that they can hardly exert any influence on social life. In contrast, the societies of economic speculation, the homosexual lobbies, the Islamic ghettos, the criminal organizations, or the simple pressure groups, formed, for instance, in the midst of the university bureaucracies, constitute factual powers against which the State does nothing.

Nevertheless, some have greeted this state of things with elation, seeing in it a manifestation of the human inclination to live in societies of common beliefs and customs, contrary to liberal individualism. Today, in fact, it has been converted, at the hands of a current originating in America called communitarianism, into a doctrine which conceives a society as a community, not of equal individuals within a neutral State, but of communities respectful of each other, which ultimately turns out to be an attempt to accommodate liberalism´s doctrinal neutralism to the new circumstances [2].

This communitarianism has sometimes been well received by some progressive ecclesiastics motivated by the same springs of adaptation to the times which had led them to bless individualist democracy some years back. But what interests us here is the fact that numerous traditionalist Catholics seem to have abandoned patriotism, believing that their sole obligation towards society, beyond the family, consists only in their adhesion to the traditional community closest to their concerns. In other words, what is of interest is that among traditional Catholics, a practical trend is developing towards communitarianism, in a frequently unconscious manner.

In sum, outside of the forms of patriotism officially admitted — cultural, aesthetic, costumbrist, constitutional — there are other attitudes among traditionalists which also have suffered some deviation, as that which considers patriotism dead, whether as a casualty of globalization or in the interest of spontaneous communities: If we add to this the crystallized patriotism of, say, the Falangistas, we find ourselves before a range of possibilities more or less deviated from the traditionalist conception of patriotism and fatherland, which may produce a certain perplexity in us, if not inducing us to error and tempting us with fashionable solutions. Temptations so much more dangerous when separatism and Europeanism pressure us "to do something" but the patriotic sentiments never know where to aim. This is why, with the pretension of shedding some light on the uncertainty which all of us face in this ever more Babel-like world, in which it has been our lot to live, I will attempt to elucidate, from a traditional perspective, what patriotism is and what is its validity. But no matter how paradoxical it may seem, I will not base myself much on traditionalist authors but on western classical thinking, and mainly on certain observations by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Traditionalism and Carlism are not reduced to glossing over what their recognized authorities have said, but they themselves have to be seen and judged from the fullness of knowledge accumulated along the centuries by Christian wisdom. A matter this, which has its importance on what our topic concerns, because, on occasions, the most conspicuous traditionalist authors have let themselves be influenced by terminologies, doctrines, and events of recent history which have smudged classical doctrine.

Patriotism is a virtue, that is, a habit to do good. A man whose actions are not determined by instincts acts voluntarily, which means he chooses among the things he knows by reason. But he does not have to elucidate each time what he has to do in accordance with the order of the universe he is aware of, he instead acquires habits by performing his actions repeatedly. These habits, when they are good are called virtues and when they are bad are called vices. And, when are they good or bad? This depends on whether they have been ordered to the ends of human nature or not, a matter which man can get to know by contemplating his own essence and the place which corresponds to him in the totality of things. If adhesion of the will to an object known rationally conducts man to his end, which is beatitude or his salvation, then the action is good and the corresponding habit is a virtue. If not, it is bad and the habit is a vice.

The diversity of virtues is established in accordance with their object. There are duties to ourselves, to the rest of men and to God. The virtue of piety has as its object those beings to which we are indebted but will never be able to repay. One of the characteristics which differentiate piety from justice is that justice demands equitable repayment of what is owed, whereas piety can only in a very partial way return what is owed, hence what is given back can never equal what is owed [3]. Piety in a super-eminent way must be exercised towards God, to whom we owe everything. But, among created beings, we must have piety towards our parents, to whom we owe our life, our upbringing, and our education. And that same virtue must also be extended to the society of men in which we were born and raised, and from which we received the benefit of order, a cultural legacy, our customs, and services without which our life, our preservation, and our improvement would have been impossible. There are, thus, two classes of piety, filial piety, and piety towards our fatherland, which is, precisely, patriotism.

This virtue, though proximate to justice, has the characteristic of notbeing it possible to be practiced with other than certain particular men. God has willed that we should be born from concrete parents and not by spontaneous generation, nor from spores, as happens with mushrooms, and He has willed that such be carried out in a wider society, thanks to which the family in which we were born, has been able to sustain itself. Well, only with such society and such people as are our parents, can we exercise the virtue of piety, which in this differs from charity, which has to be exercised with any man whatsoever, and from justice, which has to be made with anyone to whom we owe something. We can be just and also charitable to any man, but only with our parents and with our fatherland can we exercise the natural virtue of piety.

The debt we have contracted with our parents and our fatherland we requite with certain actions which are generally referred to as "cult", term which now has been restricted mostly to acts which manifest the virtue of religion and of love of God, but which must be understood in an ampler sense when it refers to parents and to the fatherland. To these things, we must not give cult of adoration or latria, which is only proper of God [4]. Cult to parents consists essentially of respecting them, obeying them, serving them, and, occasionally when circumstances require it, attending to their needs, as can happen when they become ill or lack the means to sustain themselves [5]. And the same happens with the fatherland; we owe cult to its members and rulers, that is, respect and obedience and, when necessary, we have to offer special assistance; for instance, in the case of war. In other words, towards the fatherland, aside from the respect and reverence we owe her, and of our contribution to the common good which everyone has to make from his respective position, we have to aid her when extraordinary situations present themselves such as when it is being pestered by external or internal enemies.

The common good is not what the community or what the most extended opinion in this society known as the fatherland considers good, but what is ordered to man´s proper end, which is his salvation. Saint Thomas explicitly says that filial piety does not obligate us to respect the wishes of parents who attempt, for instance, to move us away from religion, as this is a virtue higher than piety, having God Himself as its object [6]. On the contrary, we must loath (odire) parents who such pretend 'to the extent that they do this' (it is quite important to make this distinction because that does not exempt us from fulfilling other duties we owe them). It is not virtuous to respect a disorder we might find in our parents, and the same happens proportionally with the fatherland; we should not love rulers who command the contrary to the order willed by God, nor respect nor give cult to fellow citizens, insofar as they display disordered desires, but should instead loath them in that aspect. Patriotism, as any other virtue, is a disposition of the will to do good, which presupposes the knowledge of what is good or, said in other words, of the ordering of actions towards the ultimate end of man, which, in the current situation of the redeemed man, lies only in God as He has revealed Himself.

To conclude with this brief description of the patriotic virtue, it is necessary to stress its importance and its excellency declared both by pagan philosophers and by Christian thinkers. It suffices to think that the duty to love our parents, which analogously extends to the fatherland, is the first of those ten commandments which refer to fellow men, ahead of the obligation not to kill or not to commit impure acts. Suffices likewise, to bring to mind that piety towards the fatherland is even superior to the one we owe to our own parents because what is common is of greater excellency than what is particular.

In summary: Patriotism is a virtue the object of which is such society and such government which have enabled us to live and to improve ourselves, the foundation of which lies in the debt of gratitude which we have only before that society, and which obligates us to give it cult in the sense indicated above, and to procure the good proper of such society; that is, the common good, which is such only when it is directed to man´s ultimate end, present in Revelation and kept in custody by the Catholic Church. The latter is what's most important and what determines all the rest: The end of man and of the Universe is in God, and voluntary actions of man should all be directed towards attaining his own salvation and that of the others. This being understood, all of the preceding can be comprehended, and the countless errors currently committed regarding patriotism can be identified. Let us address the most noticeable ones.

1) Patriotic sentiment: Patriotism is not, properly speaking, a sentiment, but a virtue. It is true that the word patriotism is a new one and can be applied to the emotion accompanying the virtue of piety. About names, one should not dispute. Sentiments constitute a class of mental entities which had no place in classical thinking: The notion of sentiment appears for the first time in the eighteenth century and has its precedents in Pascal, with the famous phrase, according to which the heart has reasons which reason does not understand. It got thoroughly accepted in the eighteenth century thanks to Hume and Rousseau and has become a keystone of a good part of modern philosophy, from Kant's moral and religious theory to the philosophy of values. Sentiments are nothing but what classic philosophy used to call passions or affections of the soul, which in themselves are not rational, though they can be subjected to reason. There is, for instance, an evident natural tendency to love and defend the fatherland and the parents. But that in itself is not a virtue if it is not subjected to rational knowledge about the order of the universe and directed to man's ultimate end. As also, he who lacks such sentiments does not cease to be virtuous; for instance, when he has been far away from his homeland but, knowing the natural order and the commandments of the Church fulfills his patriotic duties. Philosophical sentimentalism has given those spontaneous passions a category that does not fit them, in converting them into the original guide for our life, and into the principle of all morality. To my understanding, the ultimate cause for this error lies in in the fact that such passions seem to proceed directly from the self, from human individuality shut in its own conscience, and, in converting them into guidance for its own existence, it transfers the source of morals from the natural order and the Divine law to man himself. Thanks to sentiments, thus elevated, man has been made the creator of his own destiny in accordance with the demands of modern humanism.

The fact that patriotic sentiment, just as filial sentiment, is not a virtue in itself but can be vice-ridden, can be seen in a very clear way when we think that Protestants or Muslims, liberals or democrats and defenders of the constitution can have very vivid sentiments of love of country without for this reason having also the virtue of patriotism. Precisely because the end of patriotism is found in the common good of the society we belong to, and because this good is only such if it is directed towards man´s ultimate end, it turns out that the patriotism of heretics, unbelievers, socialists or democrats have nothing of a virtue, because they pursue the perdition of man insofar as they pretend to direct the nation towards ends foreign to human nature and to God's will, as it can be the establishment of a popular democracy or an Islamic regime [7] That a Christian should praise such patriotism, as is frequent, is like being benevolent with a man who is in love with one´s wife, or with the young man who wishes to cohabitate with one's daughter, because of the deepness of the love they feel. I once saw a repulsive TV program in which a sixty-ish woman, affectedly dressed as a villager, boasted of the marvelous children she had; the camera which at the beginning focused only on her, then turned towards said children, which turned out to be two homosexuals wearing excessive makeup. It is better to have nothing than to have such kind of motherly love. Likewise, it is better to mind one´s own business than having a constitutional patriotism.

Even traditionalist thinkers have all too frequently let themselves be misled by this confusion of sentiment and virtue. I don't wish to quote anyone, but everybody is familiar with the idea that patriotism is a highly elevated and laudable sentiment. It would have been better to speak of a virtue, though, doubtless, those thinkers were referring to a patriotic sentiment previously directed by virtue and not to any disordered patriotic sentiment.

2) Folkloric patriotism. Another frequent confusion regarding patriotism concerns its object. Some believe that respecting the name, the flag and Spain's coat of arms would suffice to be a good patriot. Others believe that lauding the culture, the history, the customs or the folklore makes them good patriots. Too much pedantry and too little contents. But by this, I don't mean to say that all this should not be respected, but that it is not essential. The direct object of a virtue may be, as in this case, men and the society formed by them, but not the customs, the history, or the symbols. If such things should be respected and venerated it is only in a secondary way: whether out of consideration of the people in the society in which we live, and reverence to their parents and ancestors, or because customs and traditions facilitate the necessary unity for the society to attain its ends or, finally, because its symbols represent the society itself. All this merits respect, but only in a delegated or participated manner. and such respect is subjected to a criterion of order with respect to the end, exactly equal to the one that society itself merits. That is, not all history should be respected nor all symbols nor all customs just because they belong to our fatherland, but only because they are good.

Nowadays, those who exalt patriotism from positions contrary to or alien to Catholicism, invariably transfer its object from the men and the society with which we have contracted the debt on which patriotism is founded, to its cultural, symbolic, artistic or folkloric epiphenomenons. Thus, Sánchez Dragó showed off a supposedly patriotic virtue when he said: "be it on record that, philosophically, I remain stateless (...) but I cannot remain indifferent to the tentative to dismantle all that a country [such as Spain] has been over many centuries. I would also be enraged if that were to be done to India, to Japan, or to other nations."[8]. And the same thing happens with Pérez Reverte who, not for uttering many a vulgarity and swearword ceases to defend an aesthetic and pedantic patriotism, incoherent and selfish.

What's wrong is that such tendency has frequently impacted traditionalist writers, who sometimes place the immediate and direct object of the patriotic virtue in the traditional customs, the history or the land. When Saint Thomas speaks of the virtue of piety towards the fatherland, he mentions nothing of that sort, so scarce is the role he attributes to them. He only mentions society, its men and its government.

Let´s venerate all those things, which our nation makes it easy for us to do. Because liberals and socialists, when they wish to express pride in their fatherland can only resort to such futile motives as soccer victories, of which we Catholics could vaunt no less. But we do not need them, as we can pride ourselves of the most glorious feats which any nation has accomplished toward the reign of Christ and His Church, while progressives of all sorts have no glory to pride themselves in our history, lest it be the myriads of foreign-favoring vileness or the hunting of defenseless priests and nuns which they have committed in the last few centuries. But let us do it with the consciousness that all that is consequent to the love we owe to the current men in our society, and with the consciousness that the culture, the customs and the traditions that are in accordance with the ultimate end of man and society.

3) Substantivization of the fatherland. A third way of diverting patriotism arises from how the fatherland is conceived. I am not going to talk about the formation of modern nationalities or of the State, a matter regarding which there is an abundance of quite good writings by notable traditionalist thinkers. The fact is, that the political community, by virtue of complex historic changes has come to be identified with what is called nation nowadays. That is, fatherland and nation (terms which can be separated or identified as done, albeit with some distinctions, Mella himself) are, according to this, Spain, France, and England, Such neatness and rigidity in the conception of the object of piety cannot be found in Saint Thomas. Such virtue is exercised, according to him, with respect to parents, blood relatives, compatriots and Government, enumeration which remains open to the diverse successive community forms which culminate in kingdoms, empires, or Christendom.

The transient and accidental circumstance of the formation of what we call nations in the last centuries, which are political formations crystallized, centralized and closed to themselves, has influenced in a pernicious manner in patriotism conceptions more or less proximate to traditionalism. I refer specifically to the thinking of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who substantivizes the fatherland, conferring to it an immutable essence and a kind of separate and eternal existence [9], which through the State turns it into a principle and a focus of any political and social action. If cultural and folkloric patriotism pulls the radish from the leaves, Falangista patriotism puts the horse before the carriage. It suffices to consult the 'Norma Programática de la Falange' (Programmatic Norm of the Falange), the first point of which calls Spain a "supreme reality" [10], and which only in the next to last point remembers religion to concede that "our movement incorporates the Catholic sense — of glorious tradition and predominating in Spain — into the reconstruction of the nation"[11]. True, other possible readings can be made of José Antonio´s writing, and his position can be understood to be a reaction in face of the danger of separatism. No less a danger poses constructing doctrines to resolve concrete problems, without adopting the necessary distance and making the unavoidable abstraction. It is better to follow the example of Vázquez de Mella, whose patriotism does not fall behind that of José Antonio but does not lose sight of the place the fatherland has in the universal order, which is not described as a supreme reality from which the rest of the political principles follow, but as a reality where all elements of the Carlist trilemma converge. [12]

The reality of modern nationalities also seems to have influenced the identification of the State with the notion of the perfect society, which has been used so much in discussions about powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Neither the State nor the Nation is the only, nor the ultimate, society to which the patriotic duty is directed, understood outside of the historical conditions of modernity which have applied to them the notion of finalization or perfection. That idea of the perfect society, which includes that of its unity and of its independence, should be understood in the light of its end, not as an end in itself. The idea of perfection applied to society can be found already in Aristotle, but it was not the unity of a substance which cannot form a single substance with another, but it was the unity determined by the end of life in a community, which is to "live well" [13]. It is true that he conceived that end in a purely natural way and that in consonance with his historical circumstances he understood such perfection was present in the quite limited societies of various peoples which constituted Ancient Greece's city-states. Such a notion has been applied later to much wider societies, to the medieval kingdoms, and to the modern nations. But the essential is not unity or independence, but the attainment of the ends of the society, which is not reduced to the sustenance and natural perfection of men, but has been super-naturalized and universalized by Christianity by including it in the plan for the establishment of Christ´s kingdom on earth. This is why Carlism has insisted on the open character of the fatherland, which can be federated, can be included in empires or can tend to a superior unity, which was present in the idea of Christendom.

Here again, the ultimate criterion should be the order of the universe: the objects of piety are the societies to which we are indebted, beginning with the most proximate ones and extending toward even wider societies, without any a priori predetermined confine. Its boundaries are not prefigured in any unequivocal or definitive way but they depend on historical circumstances, they can be widened to form empires, but it is not impossible that, to fulfill their function and attain the common good, they may have to reduce themselves to more limited units. Separatism is a sedition when it seeks a particular good but destroys that good which is unity, for the sake of partisan interests or interested confrontations. But in themselves, they could be necessary to attain the common good. When Menéndez Pelayo said that, if Spain were to cease being a people of God, "it would go back to the kingdoms of the taifas", we tend to stress the loss of unity — which is bad — but much worse is that such kingdoms be of the taifas. that is, of Muslims or unbelievers. In the same way, the formation of superior units will undoubtedly be convenient when it is intended to achieve, in a better and more universal way, the end of society, which is in God; on the contrary, they should be rejected when ends are contrary to religion: Christendom would be desirable, not the European Union.

In short, patriotic piety proceeds from an extension, by an analogy of proportionality, from filial piety; and such extension comprises the diverse tiered societies, up to that whose rule encompasses our life, and has no other governments above it. Where our patriotic obligation extends to, is a matter of fact; now, as patriotic virtue includes the obligation to collaborate with the common good, and especially that of defending the unity of the fatherland, conflicts can arise between attaining the common good, rightly understood, and the unity in fact of the fatherland. In such conflict, the solution of which would be a matter of prudence in each case, the criterion that should prevail, as in all others, is the ultimate end of man and not the unity of the substantivized nation, as occurs in the fascist conception. The unity and the independence are good if they are directed toward the true common good, but it is not an absolute good. This is why from the traditional point of view, that expression of Calvo Sotelo "Spain, better red than split" is inadmissible; taken out of context it could not be more unfortunate.

Understand me properly. I believe that Spain, despite having lost commonality in its conception of a good, and despite its unity appears to be maintained by a state of degeneration, should be defended in its unity and independence. But we have to keep in mind that, in the unpredictable political Babel in which we live, that is not the ultimate good, to which the common good, understood in a Christian way, ought to be sacrificed.

4) The stateless traditionalism. The last error which I wish to point out arises from what could be described as the dissolution of the patriotic duty among Catholics. According to my interpretation, that duty is extended to all societies to which we belong, and culminates in the highest of those societies, the government of which has real power over us, legitimate or not. We have with respect to those societies the ordinary obligation to contribute to the common good and the accidental duty to attend to its extraordinary needs. In our case, this actualizes, in my view, in the extraordinary duty to confront with the means we may have at our disposal and with due prudence, those illegitimate regional, national or supranational that are above us. We have to oppose them with no less enthusiasm as against an external enemy which attempted to harass us or conquer our fatherland from abroad.

However, we see that this patriotic duty not only is not fulfilled by Catholics but they deny having it. Two distinct errors have contributed, as I understand it, to the large majority of Catholics' failure to perceive the extraordinary patriotic obligation to confront these internal enemies which deviate our society from the end toward which it should be directed. The first proceeds from the modernist contagion suffered by the ecclesiastical authorities, and of the consequent doctrine of independence of the temporal order with respect to the spiritual. The slanted Maritainian interpretation of the separation of powers, admitted by many ecclesiastical hierarchs, the decisive theoretical support of the latter to democracy; their subsequent negation to make amends after the disastrous results of such teaching; the recourse of masking the same posture with the empty rhetoric of positive secularity, all this has emptied of armies all organizations which intend to fulfill such patriotic duty. And thus, when, among Catholics spreads the alarm for the future of our fatherland, the only reaction which has commonly taken place is to vote for the PP, with great satisfaction on the part of the best bishops.

But there is yet another posture, erroneous to my understanding and scarcely condemned, which does not appear among the followers of progressivism, but among traditionalists. This error arises from believing that the fatherland extends itself only to the point where the commonality of ends conforming to Christian doctrine reach. Let me explain myself: to some, we belong only to the community of those who accept the traditionalist doctrines, and for this reason try to live in the bosom of those small traditionalist societies, with the healthy intention of preserving themselves from and their relatives from contagion by the world hostile to Christianity in which we live. They are ready to emigrate if things get bad in Spain, and only intend for the rest of their neighbors, in their view definitively lost, to respect their community, but without feeling obligated to defend the society in which we have been born, In other words, there are numerous traditionalists which get to maintain in practice and without knowing it, the doctrine of communitarianism, which at the end is a quite comfortable form of liberalism. They should not forget, however, that he who wants to save his soul may end up losing it.

It marvels seeing how so many punctilious Catholics, incapable of killing a fly or stealing a penny, faithful fulfillers of their duties of state and of their religious duties, move not one finger, give not one euro, or take the most minimum pains for the fatherland, in these dark hours it is going through, with which they commit, in my judgment, a sin of omission similar to that of abandoning the parents in their moments of need. Worse even, according to many, because, as Aristotle said, "the city is by nature anterior to the family and to each of us" [14]

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